Need help translating and understanding this sentence 「家に帰ってねたほうがいいですよ。」

Question

I’ve been trying to understand this sentence, and this is what I’ve got so far:

「家に帰って」= “to go home” although I’m not sure why the Te-form of 「帰る」is used here, instead of just 「帰る」

「ほうがいい」= “it’d be better”

So I think it means something along the lines of “you’d better go home”

I don’t know what 「ねた」and 「です」mean in this sentence, I know 「です」means “to be” but I don’t know how it fits into the sentence in this case.

I might also be mistranslating everything so far, I’m really confused about this sentence. So I want to know what this sentence translates to and I want to understand the logic behind the translation.

Answer 1

寝{ね}た is the past tense of the verb 寝{ね}る (to sleep). Why it isn't written with kanji here I couldn't say - perhaps this sentence comes from a learner's material and the reader isn't expected to know the kanji for 寝る yet? In ordinary usage I would certainly expect the kanji to be included.

At any rate, this is why the verb 帰って is in its て form - because it is part of a sequence of two verbs 帰って寝る "to go home AND sleep". Similarly 寝た is in its past form because this is the standard form to link to the common ～ほうがいい construction meaning "you should" (more literally something like "it would be better if you did...")

The です here doesn't add any actual meaning, it just makes the sentence polite. Adding です is the standard way of converting an i-adjective to the polite form - just as 彼女はかわいいです and 彼女はかわいい both mean "She's cute" but the former is polite and the latter casual, ～したほうがいいです and ～したほうがいい both mean "you should..." but with differing politeness levels.

Aside from these details, your understanding of the sentence seems fine - the meaning of the whole thing is "You should go home and sleep".